The Old Pike: A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Accidents, and Anecdotes ThereonSearight, Thomas B. (Thomas Brownfield)
History
The Old Pike: A History of the National Road, with Incidents, Accidents, and Anecdotes Thereon
Searight, Thomas B. (Thomas Brownfield)
Cumberland Road; Pennsylvania -- Biography
On the first class, you will make contracts to grade, deliver, and put
on three perches of limestone where the old bed remains firm, and four
perches where the old bed has disappeared, requiring the grade to be
finished by the 15th of October; and if the metal is all prepared by
that date, to be put on by the 1st of November, the contractor
continuing to rake the road, change the travel, and preserve the whole
work in order, until the succeeding 1st of April. Should the contractor,
however, not be able to prepare the metal to put it on the road by the
1st of November, then he is to preserve the grade of the road in order
until the first favorable state of the weather after the 15th of March
ensuing, when he is to put on the metal, raking and smoothing the
surface for twenty days after the whole metal shall have been put on the
road.
You will observe that the contract is to call for preserving the road in
either case during the winter; in one case, by adding metal, raking,
&c., and in the other, by breaking with a sledge stone to fill the ruts,
covering such stone in the spring lightly before putting on the metal.
The second class of work is the unfinished part of last year's
operations, upon which there will be time to put three and a half
additional perches per rod on such parts as were covered last year, and
four perches per rod on such as had none, requiring that it be put on by
the 1st of November, and be preserved, raked, &c., until the succeeding
1st of April, during the winter filling ruts made by travel with
additional metal, to be prepared and ready at convenient points on the
road.
For the culverts you will make a contract with one person for all that
may be necessary on half your section, and with a second person for the
other half, the work to be paid by the perch of twenty-five cubic feet,
measured by the plan and dimensions you shall designate for each
locality, and according to which plan the work must be constructed. For
this work you will require the stone to be of good proportions, with
parallel beds and faces, and not smaller than two cubic feet in each
piece, in no case ever permitting a stone to be placed "on edge," a very
common practice, destructive of good masonry. The covering stone to be
of such additional dimensions as you shall judge necessary for each
locality. The bottoms of the culverts to be paved or flagged with stone,
and such an apron constructed at each end as to guard against the ends
being undermined by the passage of the water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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